Ask HN: What was your favorite website from the 1990s?
I'm too young to remember any specific website, but I'd like to know about your old internet habits, webrings and such. I wonder how many of them are still active.
I've never found anything quite like Everything2's formula, which I think remains inspired. The trick is that the 'softlinks' at the bottom of each page is a list of the most common pages people visit after visiting that page in descending order; this includes if you use the search box to go to another page. What this means is that if you read a page and it randomly reminds you of something else on E2, and you go and visit it, an association is created. Then others can click on the new softlink at the bottom of the page - it will rise or fall by the popularity of the link.
What this leads to is some very weird serendipity and randomness in browsing. Combine this with the informal, personal atmosphere in which E2 nodes tend to be written - many articles are random personal anecdotes, strange takes or pieces of weird fiction - and it makes for something really unique.
The engine the site is built in is also interesting; it's an "everything is a node" design written in Perl. As I understand it the engine is very flexible and much of the logic of E2.com itself is written in Perl scripts stored inside a database, though I may be mistaken; I never looked into the details.
dejanews.com (before it was bought/killed by Google and when Usenet used to carry interesting discussions; interestingly, Usenet seems to occasionally have new good content in recent years after spammers and whackos have left)
A cavernous den of practical info, and mystery!
I was sad to hear that Fravia passed away - they were such an inspiration to a kid learning about computers.
also https://www.bluesnews.com, which I am astounded still looks about the same.
[1] - https://neocities.org/
geocities' taxonomies where amazing to both find and get your content found. so many x-files fan pages under area51.
I'm pretty sure I originally found it via Cool Site of the Day, which back then was the first page I went to every morning.
Earliest capture I could find (warning: popups): https://web.archive.org/web/19990830033735/http://www.hothot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/at1ux/anyone_rememb...
Both are still around, but my interests have changed since I was a child, so have not visited either for at-least 15 years.
Had a huge impact on me; it encouraged science exploration, investigation, skepticism, curiosity, and hands-on experimentation.
Edited to add parenthesis, now that I have flicked through it a bit.
Superb.
It stopped in 2017 (I think) but there is an archive at https://dmoz-odp.org/ which is frozen content but otherwise working.
I was a child back in the 90s and growing up in a lower middle class family in a developing country, we didn’t have the luxury of a consistently good internet connection. But whenever I have the chance to connect, Yahoo was perfect for me because you can see everything in one page, specifically the top international headlines + the search bar.
In the early 2000s, I’d say my favorite is stumbleupon.com.
altervista had cracks for windows shareware.
There were a lot of fun Flash(Shockwave, as it was called back then) games!
Come to think about it, I spent a lot of time on w3c.org, OASIS xml-dev mailing list archives, and other web standardization sites.
And meyerweb.com, diveintomark, joeclark.org. When we were introduced to xml and xslt, and don’t forget xsl-fo; and css was the new kid on the block, and xhtml just a glimmer, and you still heard mention of sgml and DSSSL and the difference between valid and well-formed :) And a couple of flavors of RSS (didn’t find myself on Winer’s scripting.com that much, though), oh, and now there’s Atom! Which reminds me of Sam Ruby’s intertwingly.net. I’m waxing a bit nostalgic, I fear.
We really should put up a web museum. For me, the best of times were in early 2000s after the dot-com bubble with clean sites and web design coming of it's own with Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Google (back then).
(Are those kids on my lawn?)
> Games can be rated and compared based on the shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate, which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.
Find the Pope in the Porsche
sidewalk.com
HappyHacker
(nws if you end up googling it)
“A pioneering shock site has now been repurposed to provide amusing e-mail addresses for anyone willing to cough up $50 for an Indiegogo project.”
https://www.cnet.com/news/grab-your-own-goatse-e-mail-addres...